Managing Help Desk Demand

Is your business growing faster than your IT can handle?

A well-managed, efficient and slick IT Help Desk service acts as so much more than an IT function. By the very nature of the service, users contacting a Help Desk will be experiencing problems or issues, and may often be stressed, or frustrated. Having their issues quickly and professionally dealt with can have a huge impact on individual satisfaction and productivity, and sends out an image of the brand taking a professional and serious approach to problems, without disrupting customer service.

What can cause problems for a Help Desk?

Meeting expectations on levels of service can often be difficult when faced with the challenges encountered on a busy service desk. Response times can be seriously impacted by a lack of efficiency or inappropriate focus. Many service desks will look at their initial response times as a focal point, aiming to provide a rapid answering time. This can often result in positive first impressions that may well not be followed through to a successful end result, due to focus being misplaced. A high first line fix means much more than a low answering time with longer resolution.

Problems can also arise around creating a cost effective approach, where sufficient financial priority is placed on the areas and timeslots that matter or are subject to enhanced demand.

Managing this can of course be difficult, and can be subject to many types of internal pressure, not least of which can form around how to calculate the worth of individual components to the business as a whole. Gauging issues based on their priority can also be difficult and time consuming, as well as escalation to the relevant third parties. 

How can Retail Assist help?

The specialist Help Desk team at Retail Assist offers services designed to make a business more effective, by providing a streamlined approach to issues. By centralising all problems to one single point of contact, any incident that occurs across an entire business can be logged and resolved in the same place, creating a uniformed and unified service. As the service blends seamlessly with internal teams, the IT Help Desk forms an extension of the business, where problems are managed end-to-end from the point of contact to resolution.

The financial benefits to the business are very valuable. The service removes the need for staffing internally, such as the ability to flex cover over peak periods, and all costs are transparent. Regular meetings with users of the IT Help Desk service mean that improvements are continually made in order to align with expectations.

In a similar manner, a proactive approach is taken to the incidents about which the IT Help Desk is contacted in order to prevent occurrences of issues in the future. As a result the top issues that the IT Help Desk encounters each month are collected, assessed and removed in order to reduce the volume of incidents that may occur.

Retail Assist’s IT Help Desk service is ISO 20000 accredited, follows the ITIL framework and holds membership of the Service Desk Institute (SDI): assurance is provided in terms of quality best practice as well as effectiveness. 20 years of experience within the retail and hospitality sector means that the understanding of technology Retail Assist possesses is unparalleled. Cover is available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, in a variety of languages, in recognition of the fact that IT Help Desk support needs to reflect the demands of modern global business.

If you’re interested in outsourcing any of your IT requirements, get in touch here.